children and non-literal meaning ... again

[Isenthia]

Dear Barbara, Anat, Aliyha and Lorraine,

thanks for your comments. I don't know why I never thought about it
that the fact that children engage in symbolic or pretense play might
be suggestive about how difficult it actually is for them to
understand particular types of language use (although now that I think
about it, I remember that it was mentioned in studies on autistic
children that often they both do not engage in pretense play and have
problems understanding figurative language such as metaphor).

I also noticed that I accidentally used the wrong term in my earlier
post (`polysemous' instead of `homonymous'). Thus, what I actually
wanted to express was:

The question is whether it is necessarily the case
that a child in being exposed to these kinds of uses of an expression
first has to grasp what intuitively seems to be the underlying meaning
and then derives other uses from that or whether he simply will treat
the expression initially as if it were HOMONYMOUS and only in a later
step connects the meanings in some way with one another.

As for your description, Barbara, of the grey area, as it were,
between literal and figurative uses as a `slope': this actually brings
out nicely the general problem I have with a literal/non-literal
meaning dichotomy which seems to me an idealised polarisation of
`kinds of meaning', where there actually is no clear boundary
separating the one from the other. At the least, the idea of
conventionality seems of no help here, as there are enough examples of
highly familiar non-literal uses for expressions. Moreover, in the
context of acquisition, as all your comments suggest,if the input
children are exposed to already normally does include what might be
termed non-literal uses for expressions, the usefulness of the notion
of conventionality to distinguish between literal and non-literal
meaning becomes even more questionable, I think.

Thanks again
Kristin

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